“November” tells a type of story more or less invented by Edgar Allen Poe and brought to perfection by Ambrose Bierce before he vanished into Pancho Villa’s uprising in 1916: a compelling narrative constantly undercuts itself by causing the reader or viewer to doubt the objective reality of the tale. Is all this really happening, or does one of these characters merely think that it is happening?

The film is divided into four approximately equal parts, each one beginning with the legend “November 7.” The four sections present four different versions of the hold-up of a convenience store. In every version, the proprietor and his clerk are killed, and the perpetrator is always the same sweaty psychopath (Matthew Carey).

Where the versions differ is in who else gets shot and-one presumes-mortally wounded. The center of consciousness appears always to be that of Sophie Jacobs (Courteney Cox Arquette), a photographer with a live-in boyfriend, a lawyer named Hugh (James LeGros), who is the victim in the first version of the story. Sophie has recently begun an affair with Jesse (Michael Ealy), who works with her. Jesse is the victim in the second version. At the end of the third version, Sophie herself seems about to become the target. In the fourth version, . . . well, that just might be the “real” version, so I’ll keep that to myself.

In the mean time, Sophie has sessions with Dr. Fayn (Nora Dunn), a psychiatrist, is interviewed several times by Officer Roberts (Nick Offerman), the police detective assigned to the hold-up, and has lunch with her mother (Anne Archer).

Greg Harrison’s direction is a little too detached for its own good. Arquette is attractive enough, though she seems to be doing her best to disguise the fact; she just isn’t very engaging. Her character is not a particularly nice person, and she underplays every scene to the point of not playing it at all. All in all, the payoff isn’t satisfying enough to warrant all the obfuscation in the mean time.

Rated R, “November” looks good enough to have been shot on film, but was done on high-definition video.

COURTESY PHOTO